Please note: Our 100-hour Yoga Immersion + Urban Ashram is the first 100-hours of these teacher training programs. In this Immersion, Deepening is our theme. Yoga teachings are integrated via direct experience, practice, skill development, and the transmission that is created when people practice immersively with fellow sincere practitioners. Please visit the 100-hour Immersion page for more information.

Yogajoy Professional Training is a 300-hour program preparing teachers provide individual and small group yoga programs and preparing Allied Health Professionals to integrate yoga tools into their private practice or public service roles.

What are the differences between the amrita yoga and Yoga & Social Justice trainings?

Similarities:

Both programs will teach trainees about the philosophy and psychology of yoga as well as mindfulness tools, information on how the nervous system functions and why yoga teachers need to be informed about the aspects of nervous system that affect the students’ body and brain, and breathing practices to help students navigate their mind-body relationship.

Both trainings will teach trainees about how to use language skills to articulate the yoga poses, create demonstrations for students to learn about the poses, make observations about students’ poses and use verbal suggestions to support them to create better alignment in the poses, and how to use hands on support to facilitate a student’s learning.

Differences:

The Yoga and Social Justice training program aims to help trainees become teachers who are prepared to teach students who have experienced adversity, marginalization, oppression, trauma, prejudice, or mental health challenges, and who may be seeking yoga as a resource to develop life skills to improve their health, both body and mind. These students may seek out yoga in settings other than yoga studios or athletic clubs, settings such as mental health centers, hospital clinics, treatment centers, or at yoga studios that focus on yoga therapy.

Teachers will be able to understand students who have experienced or who are experiencing chronic pain, anxiety, or depression, PTSD, active addiction and so on.

The amrita yoga training program helps trainees prepare to teach vinyasa (flow-based) yoga classes in yoga studios or in athletic clubs, etc. Students will also learn about Ayurveda

– the medicine of yoga – which includes understanding that students (all of us) have core constitutions that tend to go out of balance (Ayurveda teaches us how to bring those imbalances back to balance) and understanding that nature also has certain cycles. In other words, how we practice yoga in spring is actually different than in the fall, based on what’s happening in nature.

Teachers in this training program will be able to work with a variety of students, though will likely work more with the average student of yoga – those who may need fewer adaptations and whose health is less vulnerable (mentally and physically) than a student with active PTSD, or one with a mental health challenge or suffering from active addiction.